My pleasure... there's a surprising amount of literature online now regarding ships... I wish the internet was what it is now when I was really into starship design, I probably would have went into engineering instead of marketing in college.

My personal inclination is to believe that all of the ships looked like the 'original' and ignore the inconsistency in the second model, unless there's evidence to the contrary that the original model precludes doing so.

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There existed quite a few variants of the model - with different bridge domes, different "impulse crystals", and then eventually the E-B variant. This for me sounds like a sufficient reason to go for multiple variants of the ship, too: at least those represented by the models, and perhaps several more, including but not being limited to some mix-and-match-canon-features ships. That's echoing the real world, both in the sense of echoing the modeling reality and in the sense of imitating real-world diversity of ship design.

I'd also think something called the Great Experiment would be in a state of design flux for quite some time, resulting in alterations of mission profile and onboard gear. Decades upon decades of service would work towards that same result of design evolution.

On the other hand, for a ship whose drive didn't perform as intended, the Excelsior remarkably retains her warp engines essentially externally unchanged. That to me suggests that the failure wasn't particularly serious... Or that the failed components weren't in the nacelles. What if the ventral cavity, unseen in ST3, was originally to house an all-important transwarp coil? The ship was built around this piece of equipment, and would have required major design changes were the cavity to be removed (the ventral guns were mounted on this structure already, etc.) - so Starfleet left it there, and also built it into the newer ships, even though the transwarp coil was gone by ST4 already.

Thus, the cavity in later ships is doing make-work: it houses a telescoping self-repair crane (which is what the greeblie most looks like) or perhaps a relay buoy dispenser, or then remains free for carrying all sorts of outsize cargo. Usually it's merely exposed to vacuum, though.

There are parallels in the real world: WWI battleships converted to all-new powerplants for WWII, but retaining some superstructures merely for reasons of correctly directing the smoke from the stacks even though the original innards are gone and have been replaced by completely unrelated machines that would better have fit in a completely different structure...

Timo Saloniemi

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A Star Trek novel explained in great detail why transwarp drive was a failure.The crew suffered from micro distortions in local space causing madness.The effect could not be negated and also caused them to go partially into a different continuum.

I cannot remember the name but it was published in the time period after Star Trek III was released, possibly about within a 5 year time frame.

A Star Trek novel explained in great detail why transwarp drive was a failure.The crew suffered from micro distortions in local space causing madness.The effect could not be negated and also caused them to go partially into a different continuum.

I cannot remember the name but it was published in the time period after Star Trek III was released, possibly about within a 5 year time frame.

Can anybody remember the novel's title?

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No, but I do remember the VOY episode "Threshold" that had to do with breaking the Warp 10 barrier (sometimes referred to as Transwarp) and our friend Tom Paris had some interesting side effects. I'd say what you're describing is pretty close to canon... but still grain of salt territory.

Bump... Preator, you still alive buddy? I was thinking, when you wrap this up, you want to tag team an Ambassador class manual with me? I've always loved that class... and there's not a lot of good material out there on it.

Ha, yeah, I'm here. I haven't had a chance to do much more. And I would be interested in doing an Ambassador one, as I do have some specific notions about it, assuming I can finish the Excelsior one first. The real hangup is the graphics (i.e. deckplans, schematics, etc.) that I want to produce myself, which right now I just don't have time for.

Just finished reading the historical background...amazing stuff and it fits nicely into the movies and books. President Sulu? Is that from a novel or your own creation? Either way I like Hikaru's fate. I'll be going over the technical data over the next couple of days. Are you planning on doing something similar for other ship classes or just focusing on Excelsior right now?

Just finished reading the historical background...amazing stuff and it fits nicely into the movies and books. President Sulu? Is that from a novel or your own creation? Either way I like Hikaru's fate. I'll be going over the technical data over the next couple of days. Are you planning on doing something similar for other ship classes or just focusing on Excelsior right now?

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Thanks, very much. If you find questions of the technical sort, please do ask them as it will give me reason to think about this, which will in turn make me want to work on it more.

I believe the idea of President Sulu came from one of the novels, though I don't recall which one. Originally I wanted to leave Sulu's fate ambiguous since it wasn't canon or anything, but the dramatic opportunity presented itself rather organically to have the ship retired as he died, and sort of link them, and it was too good to pass up. (Also, I somewhat hate the idea of all the TOS crew either being "immortal" or staying in Starfleet their whole lives.)

And, I would like to do something similar for some other classes, though perhaps not quite to the deckplans extent.

Praetor, I really like this project and am looking forward to the end result.

The only suggestions I have are to:

1) Lighten up on poor Styles. It doesn't seem proper for the writers of a tech manual to be criticizing a Captain's career. But, to account for his disappearance and Sulu's commission of the ship... perhaps Styles was killed by way of an accident related to the transwarp failure, leading to the project being shut down?

2) Trim down the Ambassador and Galaxy stuff. This ain't their tech manual

Sorry if someone's mentioned these things already, I more or less skimmed past most people's posts besides yours.

Edit: One more suggestion... I'd replace the 'federation news service' as just a general press corps. The press shouldn't be entwined with government in a free society.